Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin

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Lecture I--SesameLecture II--LiliesPreface to the Later EditionsLecture III--The Mystery of Life and its Arts

LECTURE I--SESAME. OF KING'S TREASURIES

"You shall each have a cake of sesame,--and ten pound."Lucian: The Fisherman.

My first duty this evening is to ask your pardon for the ambiguityof title under which the subject of lecture has been announced: forindeed I am not going to talk of kings, known as regnant, nor oftreasuries, understood to contain wealth; but of quite another orderof royalty, and another material of riches, than those usuallyacknowledged. I had even intended to ask your attention for alittle while on trust, and (as sometimes one contrives, in taking afriend to see a favourite piece of scenery) to hide what I wantedmost to show, with such imperfect cunning as I might, until weunexpectedly reached the best point of view by winding paths. But--and as also I have heard it said, by men practised in publicaddress, that hearers are never so much fatigued as by the endeavourto follow a speaker who gives them no clue to his purpose,--I willtake the slight mask off at once, and tell you plainly that I wantto speak to you about the treasures hidden in books; and about theway we find them, and the way we lose them. A grave subject, youwill say; and a wide one! Yes; so wide that I shall make no effortto touch the compass of it. I will try only to bring before you afew simple thoughts about reading, which press themselves upon meevery day more deeply, as I watch the course of the public mind withrespect to our daily enlarging means of education; and theansweringly wider spreading on the levels, of the irrigation ofliterature.

It happens that I have practically some connexion with schools fordifferent classes of youth; and I receive many letters from parentsrespecting the education of their children. In the mass of theseletters I am always struck by the precedence which the idea of a"position in life" takes above all other thoughts in the parents'--more especially in the mothers'--minds. "The education befittingsuch and such a STATION IN LIFE"--this is the phrase, this theobject, always. They never seek, as far as I can make out, aneducation good in itself; even the conception of abstract rightnessin training rarely seems reached by the writers. But, an education"which shall keep a good coat on my son's back;--which shall enablehim to ring with confidence the visitors' bell at double-belleddoors; which shall result ultimately in establishment of a double-belled door to his own house;--in a word, which shall lead toadvancement in life;--THIS we pray for on bent knees--and this isALL we pray for." It never seems to occur to the parents that theremay be an education which, in itself, IS advancement in Life;--thatany other than that may perhaps be advancement in Death; and thatthis essential education might be more easily got, or given, thanthey fancy, if they set about it in the right way; while it is forno price, and by no favour, to be got, if they set about it in thewrong.

Indeed, among the ideas most prevalent and effective in the mind ofthis busiest of countries, I suppose the first--at least that whichis confessed with the greatest frankness, and put forward as thefittest stimulus to youthful exertion--is this of "Advancement inlife." May I ask you to consider with me, what this ideapractically includes, and what it should include?

Practically, then, at present, "advancement in life" means, becomingconspicuous in life; obtaining a position which shall beacknowledged by others to be respectable or honourable. We do notunderstand by this advancement, in general, the mere making ofmoney, but the being known to have made it; not the accomplishmentof any great aim, but the being seen to have accomplished it. In aword, we mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. Thatthirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the firstinfirmity of weak ones; and, on the whole, the strongest impulsiveinfluence of average humanity: the greatest efforts of the racehave always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatestcatastrophes to the love of pleasure.

I am not about to attack or defend this impulse. I want you only tofeel how it lies at the root of effort; especially of all moderneffort. It is the gratification of vanity which is, with us, thestimulus of toil and balm of repose; so closely does it touch thevery springs of life that the wounding of our vanity is alwaysspoken of (and truly) as in its measure MORTAL; we call it"mortification," using the same expression which we should apply toa gangrenous and incurable bodily hurt. And although a few of usmay be physicians enough to recognise the various effect of thispassion upon health and energy, I believe most honest men know, andwould at once acknowledge, its leading power with them as a motive.The seaman does not commonly desire to be made captain only becausehe knows he can manage the ship better than any other sailor onboard. He wants to be made captain that he may be CALLED captain.The clergyman does not usually want to be made a bishop only becausehe believes that no other hand can, as firmly as his, direct thediocese through its difficulties. He wants to be made bishopprimarily that he may be called "My Lord." And a prince does notusually desire to enlarge, or a subject to gain, a kingdom, becausehe believes no one else can as well serve the State, upon itsthrone; but, briefly, because he wishes to be addressed as "YourMajesty," by as many lips as may be brought to such utterance.

This, then, being the main idea of "advancement in life," the forceof it applies, for all of us, according to our station, particularlyto that secondary result of such advancement which we call "gettinginto good society." We want to get into good society, not that wemay have it, but that we may be seen in it; and our notion of itsgoodness depends primarily on its conspicuousness.

Will you pardon me if I pause for a moment to put what I fear youmay think an impertinent question? I never can go on with anaddress unless I feel, or know, that my audience are either with meor against me: I do not much care which, in beginning; but I mustknow where they are; and I would fain find out, at this instant,whether you think I am putting the motives of popular action toolow. I am resolved, to-night, to state them low enough to beadmitted as probable; for whenever, in my writings on PoliticalEconomy, I assume that a little honesty, or generosity,--or whatused to be called "virtue,"--may be calculated upon as a humanmotive of action, people always answer me, saying, "You must notcalculate on that: that is not in human nature: you must notassume anything to be common to men but acquisitiveness andjealousy; no other feeling ever has influence on them, exceptaccidentally, and in matters out of the way of business." I begin,accordingly, tonight low in the scale of motives; but I must know ifyou think me right in doing so. Therefore, let me ask those whoadmit the love of praise to be usually the strongest motive in men'sminds in seeking advancement, and the honest desire of doing anykind of duty to be an entirely secondary one, to hold up theirhands. (About a dozen hands held up--the audience, partly, notbeing sure the lecturer is serious, and, partly, shy of expressingopinion.) I am quite serious--I really do want to know what youthink; however, I can judge by putting the reverse question. Willthose who think that duty is generally the first, and love of praisethe second, motive, hold up their hands? (One hand reported to havebeen held up behind the lecturer.) Very good: I see you are withme, and that you think I have not begun too near the ground. Now,without teasing you by putting farther question, I venture to assumethat you will admit duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive.You think that the desire of doing something useful, or obtainingsome real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though asecondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You will grantthat moderately honest men desire place and office, at least in somemeasure for the sake of beneficent power; and would wish toassociate rather with sensible and well-informed persons than withfools and ignorant persons, whether they are seen in the company ofthe sensible ones or not. And finally, without being troubled byrepetition of any common truisms about the preciousness of friends,and the influence of companions, you will admit, doubtless, thataccording to the sincerity of our desire that our friends may betrue, and our companions wise,--and in proportion to the earnestnessand discretion with which we choose both,--will be the generalchances of our happiness and usefulness.

But, granting that we had both the will and the sense to choose ourfriends well, how few of us have the power! or, at least, howlimited, for most, is the sphere of choice! Nearly all ourassociations are determined by chance or necessity; and restrictedwithin a narrow circle. We cannot know whom we would; and thosewhom we know, we cannot have at our side when we most need them.All the higher circles of human intelligence are, to those beneath,only momentarily and partially open. We may, by good fortune,obtain a glimpse of a great poet, and hear the sound of his voice;or put a question to a man of science, and be answered good-humouredly. We may intrude ten minutes' talk on a cabinet minister,answered probably with words worse than silence, being deceptive; orsnatch, once or twice in our lives, the privilege of throwing abouquet in the path of a princess, or arresting the kind glance of aqueen. And yet these momentary chances we covet; and spend ouryears, and passions, and powers, in pursuit of little more thanthese; while, meantime, there is a society continually open to us,of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rankor occupation;--talk to us in the best words they can choose, and ofthe things nearest their hearts. And this society, because it is sonumerous and so gentle, and can be kept waiting round us all daylong,--kings and statesmen lingering patiently, not to grantaudience, but to gain it!--in those plainly furnished and narrowante-rooms, our bookcase shelves,--we make no account of thatcompany,--perhaps never listen to a word they would say, all daylong!

You may tell me, perhaps, or think within yourselves, that theapathy with which we regard this company of the noble, who arepraying us to listen to them; and the passion with which we pursuethe company, probably of the ignoble, who despise us, or who havenothing to teach us, are grounded in this,--that we can see thefaces of the living men, and it is themselves, and not theirsayings, with which we desire to become familiar. But it is not so.Suppose you never were to see their faces;--suppose you could be putbehind a screen in the statesman's cabinet, or the prince's chamber,would you not be glad to listen to their words, though you wereforbidden to advance beyond the screen? And when the screen is onlya little less, folded in two instead of four, and you can be hiddenbehind the cover of the two boards that bind a book, and listen allday long, not to the casual talk, but to the studied, determined,chosen addresses of the wisest of men;--this station of audience,and honourable privy council, you despise!

But perhaps you will say that it is because the living people talkof things that are passing, and are of immediate interest to you,that you desire to hear them. Nay; that cannot be so, for theliving people will themselves tell you about passing matters muchbetter in their writings than in their careless talk. Yet I admitthat this motive does influence you, so far as you prefer thoserapid and ephemeral writings to slow and enduring writings--books,properly so called. For all books are divisible into two classes,the books of the hour, and the books of all time. Mark thisdistinction--it is not one of quality only. It is not merely thebad book that does not last, and the good one that does. It is adistinction of species. There are good books for the hour, and goodones for all time; bad books for the hour, and bad ones for alltime. I must define the two kinds before I go farther.

The good book of the hour, then,--I do not speak of the bad ones,--is simply the useful or pleasant talk of some person whom you cannototherwise converse with, printed for you. Very useful often,telling you what you need to know; very pleasant often, as asensible friend's present talk would be. These bright accounts oftravels; good-humoured and witty discussions of question; lively orpathetic story-telling in the form of novel; firm fact-telling, bythe real agents concerned in the events of passing history;--allthese books of the hour, multiplying among us as education becomesmore general, are a peculiar possession of the present age: weought to be entirely thankful for them, and entirely ashamed ofourselves if we make no good use of them. But we make the worstpossible use if we allow them to usurp the place of true books:for, strictly speaking, they are not books at all, but merelyletters or newspapers in good print. Our friend's letter may bedelightful, or necessary, to-day: whether worth keeping or not, isto be considered. The newspaper may be entirely proper at breakfasttime, but assuredly it is not reading for all day. So, though boundup in a volume, the long letter which gives you so pleasant anaccount of the inns, and roads, and weather, last year at such aplace, or which tells you that amusing story, or gives you the realcircumstances of such and such events, however valuable foroccasional reference, may not be, in the real sense of the word, a"book" at all, nor, in the real sense, to be "read." A book isessentially not a talking thing, but a written thing; and written,not with a view of mere communication, but of permanence. The bookof talk is printed only because its author cannot speak to thousandsof people at once; if he could, he would--the volume is mereMULTIPLICATION of his voice. You cannot talk to your friend inIndia; if you could, you would; you write instead: that is mereCONVEYANCE of voice. But a book is written, not to multiply thevoice merely, not to carry it merely, but to perpetuate it. Theauthor has something to say which he perceives to be true anduseful, or helpfully beautiful. So far as he knows, no one has yetsaid it; so far as he knows, no one else can say it. He is bound tosay it, clearly and melodiously if he may; clearly at all events.In the sum of his life he finds this to be the thing, or group ofthings, manifest to him;--this, the piece of true knowledge, orsight, which his share of sunshine and earth has permitted him toseize. He would fain set it down for ever; engrave it on rock, ifhe could; saying, "This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, anddrank, and slept, loved, and hated, like another; my life was as thevapour, and is not; but this I saw and knew: this, if anything ofmine, is worth your memory." That is his "writing;" it is, in hissmall human way, and with whatever degree of true inspiration is inhim, his inscription, or scripture. That is a "Book."

Perhaps you think no books were ever so written?

But, again, I ask you, do you at all believe in honesty, or at allin kindness, or do you think there is never any honesty orbenevolence in wise people? None of us, I hope, are so unhappy asto think that. Well, whatever bit of a wise man's work is honestlyand benevolently done, that bit is his book or his piece of art. {5}It is mixed always with evil fragments--ill-done, redundant,affected work. But if you read rightly, you will easily discoverthe true bits, and those ARE the book.

Now books of this kind have been written in all ages by theirgreatest men:- by great readers, great statesmen, and greatthinkers. These are all at your choice; and Life is short. Youhave heard as much before;--yet have you measured and mapped outthis short life and its possibilities? Do you know, if you readthis, that you cannot read that--that what you lose to-day youcannot gain to-morrow? Will you go and gossip with your housemaid,or your stable-boy, when you may talk with queens and kings; orflatter yourself that it is with any worthy consciousness of yourown claims to respect, that you jostle with the hungry and commoncrowd for ENTREE here, and audience there, when all the while thiseternal court is open to you, with its society, wide as the world,multitudinous as its days, the chosen, and the mighty, of everyplace and time? Into that you may enter always; in that you maytake fellowship and rank according to your wish; from that, onceentered into it, you can never be outcast but by your own fault; byyour aristocracy of companionship there, your own inherentaristocracy will be assuredly tested, and the motives with which youstrive to take high place in the society of the living, measured, asto all the truth and sincerity that are in them, by the place youdesire to take in this company of the Dead.

"The place you desire," and the place you FIT YOURSELF FOR, I mustalso say; because, observe, this court of the past differs from allliving aristocracy in this:- it is open to labour and to merit, butto nothing else. No wealth will bribe, no name overawe, no artificedeceive, the guardian of those Elysian gates. In the deep sense, novile or vulgar person ever enters there. At the portieres of thatsilent Faubourg St. Germain, there is but brief question:- "Do youdeserve to enter? Pass. Do you ask to be the companion of nobles?Make yourself noble, and you shall be. Do you long for theconversation of the wise? Learn to understand it, and you shallhear it. But on other terms?--no. If you will not rise to us, wecannot stoop to you. The living lord may assume courtesy, theliving philosopher explain his thought to you with considerate pain;but here we neither feign nor interpret; you must rise to the levelof our thoughts if you would be gladdened by them, and share ourfeelings, if you would recognise our presence."

This, then, is what you have to do, and I admit that it is much.You must, in a word, love these people, if you are to be among them.No ambition is of any use. They scorn your ambition. You must lovethem, and show your love in these two following ways.

(1) First, by a true desire to be taught by them, and to enter intotheir thoughts. To enter into theirs, observe; not to find your ownexpressed by them. If the person who wrote the book is not wiserthan you, you need not read it; if he be, he will think differentlyfrom you in many respects.

(2) Very ready we are to say of a book, "How good this is--that'sexactly what I think!" But the right feeling is, "How strange thatis! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or ifI do not now, I hope I shall, some day." But whether thussubmissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author toget at HIS meaning, not to find yours. Judge it afterwards if youthink yourself qualified to do so; but ascertain it first. And besure, also, if the author is worth anything, that you will not getat his meaning all at once;--nay, that at his whole meaning you willnot for a long time arrive in any wise. Not that he does not saywhat he means, and in strong words too; but he cannot say it all;and what is more strange, will not, but in a hidden way and inparables, in order that he may be sure you want it. I cannot quitesee the reason of this, nor analyse that cruel reticence in thebreasts of wise men which makes them always hide their deeperthought. They do not give it you by way of help, but of reward; andwill make themselves sure that you deserve it before they allow youto reach it. But it is the same with the physical type of wisdom,gold. There seems, to you and me, no reason why the electric forcesof the earth should not carry whatever there is of gold within it atonce to the mountain tops, so that kings and people might know thatall the gold they could get was there; and without any trouble ofdigging, or anxiety, or chance, or waste of time, cut it away, andcoin as much as they needed. But Nature does not manage it so. Sheputs it in little fissures in the earth, nobody knows where: youmay dig long and find none; you must dig painfully to find any.

And it is just the same with men's best wisdom. When you come to agood book, you must ask yourself, "Am I inclined to work as anAustralian miner would? Are my pickaxes and shovels in good order,and am I in good trim myself, my sleeves well up to the elbow, andmy breath good, and my temper?" And, keeping the figure a littlelonger, even at cost of tiresomeness, for it is a thoroughly usefulone, the metal you are in search of being the author's mind ormeaning, his words are as the rock which you have to crush and smeltin order to get at it. And your pickaxes are your own care, wit,and learning; your smelting furnace is your own thoughtful soul. Donot hope to get at any good author's meaning without those tools andthat fire; often you will need sharpest, finest chiselling, andpatientest fusing, before you can gather one grain of the metal.

And, therefore, first of all, I tell you earnestly andauthoritatively (I KNOW I am right in this), you must get into thehabit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of theirmeaning, syllable by syllable--nay, letter by letter. For though itis only by reason of the opposition of letters in the function ofsigns, to sounds in the function of signs, that the study of booksis called "literature," and that a man versed in it is called, bythe consent of nations, a man of letters instead of a man of books,or of words, you may yet connect with that accidental nomenclaturethis real fact:- that you might read all the books in the BritishMuseum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly"illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of agood book, letter by letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,--you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. The entiredifference between education and non-education (as regards themerely intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. A well-educated gentleman may not know many languages,--may not be able tospeak any but his own,--may have read very few books. But whateverlanguage he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces,he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the PEERAGE ofwords; knows the words of true descent and ancient blood, at aglance, from words of modern canaille; remembers all their ancestry,their intermarriages, distant relationships, and the extent to whichthey were admitted, and offices they held, among the nationalnoblesse of words at any time, and in any country. But anuneducated person may know, by memory, many languages, and talk themall, and yet truly know not a word of any,--not a word even of hisown. An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to makehis way ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence ofany language to be known for an illiterate person: so also theaccent, or turn of expression of a single sentence, will at oncemark a scholar. And this is so strongly felt, so conclusivelyadmitted, by educated persons, that a false accent or a mistakensyllable is enough, in the parliament of any civilized nation, toassign to a man a certain degree of inferior standing for ever.

And this is right; but it is a pity that the accuracy insisted on isnot greater, and required to a serious purpose. It is right that afalse Latin quantity should excite a smile in the House of Commons;but it is wrong that a false English MEANING should NOT excite afrown there. Let the accent of words be watched; and closely: lettheir meaning be watched more closely still, and fewer will do thework. A few words well chosen, and distinguished, will do work thata thousand cannot, when every one is acting, equivocally, in thefunction of another. Yes; and words, if they are not watched, willdo deadly work sometimes. There are masked words droning andskulking about us in Europe just now,--(there never were so many,owing to the spread of a shallow, blotching, blundering, infectious"information," or rather deformation, everywhere, and to theteaching of catechisms and phrases at school instead of humanmeanings)--there are masked words abroad, I say, which nobodyunderstands, but which everybody uses, and most people will alsofight for, live for, or even die for, fancying they mean this orthat, or the other, of things dear to them: for such words wearchameleon cloaks--"ground-lion" cloaks, of the colour of the groundof any man's fancy: on that ground they lie in wait, and rend themwith a spring from it. There never were creatures of prey somischievous, never diplomatists so cunning, never poisoners sodeadly, as these masked words; they are the unjust stewards of allmen's ideas: whatever fancy or favourite instinct a man mostcherishes, he gives to his favourite masked word to take care of forhim; the word at last comes to have an infinite power over him,--youcannot get at him but by its ministry.

And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is afatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whetherthey will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for anidea when they want it to be awful; and Saxon or otherwise commonwords when they want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutaryeffect, for instance, would be produced on the minds of people whoare in the habit of taking the Form of the "Word" they live by, forthe Power of which that Word tells them, if we always eitherretained, or refused, the Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," as theright expression for "book"--instead of employing it only in the oneinstance in which we wish to give dignity to the idea, andtranslating it into English everywhere else. How wholesome it wouldbe for many simple persons if, in such places (for instance) as Actsxix. 19, we retained the Greek expression, instead of translatingit, and they had to read--"Many of them also which used curiousarts, brought their bibles together, and burnt them before all men;and they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousandpieces of silver"! Or if, on the other hand, we translated where weretain it, and always spoke of "The Holy Book," instead of "HolyBible," it might come into more heads than it does at present, thatthe Word of God, by which the heavens were, of old, and by whichthey are now kept in store, {6} cannot be made a present of toanybody in morocco binding; nor sown on any wayside by help eitherof steam plough or steam press; but is nevertheless being offered tous daily, and by us with contumely refused; and sown in us daily,and by us, as instantly as may be, choked.

So, again, consider what effect has been produced on the Englishvulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin form "damno," intranslating the Greek [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], whenpeople charitably wish to make it forcible; and the substitution ofthe temperate "condemn" for it, when they choose to keep it gentle;and what notable sermons have been preached by illiterate clergymenon--"He that believeth not shall be damned;" though they wouldshrink with horror from translating Heb. xi. 7, "The saving of hishouse, by which he damned the world," or John viii. 10-11, "Woman,hath no man damned thee? She saith, No man, Lord. Jesus answeredher, Neither do I damn thee: go and sin no more." And divisions inthe mind of Europe, which have cost seas of blood, and in thedefence of which the noblest souls of men have been cast away infrantic desolation, countless as forest-leaves--though, in the heartof them, founded on deeper causes--have nevertheless been renderedpractically possible, mainly, by the European adoption of the Greekword for a public meeting, "ecclesia," to give peculiarrespectability to such meetings, when held for religious purposes;and other collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English oneof using the word "Priest" as a contraction for "presbyter."

Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit you mustform. Nearly every word in your language has been first a word ofsome other language--of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or Greek; (notto speak of eastern and primitive dialects). And many words havebeen all these--that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next,French or German next, and English last: undergoing a certainchange of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but retaining adeep vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in employing them,even at this day. If you do not know the Greek alphabet, learn it;young or old--girl or boy--whoever you may be, if you think ofreading seriously (which, of course, implies that you have someleisure at command), learn your Greek alphabet; then get gooddictionaries of all these languages, and whenever you are in doubtabout a word, hunt it down patiently. Read Max Muller's lecturesthoroughly, to begin with; and, after that, never let a word escapeyou that looks suspicious. It is severe work; but you will find it,even at first, interesting, and at last endlessly amusing. And thegeneral gain to your character, in power and precision, will bequite incalculable.

Mind, this does not imply knowing, or trying to know, Greek orLatin, or French. It takes a whole life to learn any languageperfectly. But you can easily ascertain the meanings through whichthe English word has passed; and those which in a good writer's workit must still bear.

And now, merely for example's sake, I will, with your permission,read a few lines of a true book with you, carefully; and see whatwill come out of them. I will take a book perfectly known to youall. No English words are more familiar to us, yet few perhaps havebeen read with less sincerity. I will take these few followinglines of Lycidas:-

"Last came, and last did go,The pilot of the Galilean lake.Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain,)He shook his mitred locks, and stern bespake,'How well could I have spared for thee, young swain,Enow of such as for their bellies' sakeCreep, and intrude, and climb into the fold!Of other care they little reckoning make,Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast,And shove away the worthy bidden guest;Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to holdA sheep-hook, or have learn'd aught else, the leastThat to the faithful herdman's art belongs!What recks it them? What need they? They are sped;And when they list, their lean and flashy songsGrate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,But, swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;Besides what the grim wolf with privy pawDaily devours apace, and nothing said.'"

Let us think over this passage, and examine its words.

First, is it not singular to find Milton assigning to St. Peter, notonly his full episcopal function, but the very types of it whichProtestants usually refuse most passionately? His "mitred" locks!Milton was no Bishop-lover; how comes St. Peter to be "mitred"?"Two massy keys he bore." Is this, then, the power of the keysclaimed by the Bishops of Rome? and is it acknowledged here byMilton only in a poetical licence, for the sake of itspicturesqueness, that he may get the gleam of the golden keys tohelp his effect?

Do not think it. Great men do not play stage tricks with thedoctrines of life and death: only little men do that. Milton meanswhat he says; and means it with his might too--is going to put thewhole strength of his spirit presently into the saying of it. Forthough not a lover of false bishops, he WAS a lover of true ones;and the Lake-pilot is here, in his thoughts, the type and head oftrue episcopal power. For Milton reads that text, "I will give untothee the keys of the kingdom of heaven," quite honestly. Puritanthough he be, he would not blot it out of the book because therehave been bad bishops; nay, in order to understand HIM, we mustunderstand that verse first; it will not do to eye it askance, orwhisper it under our breath, as if it were a weapon of an adversesect. It is a solemn, universal assertion, deeply to be kept inmind by all sects. But perhaps we shall be better able to reason onit if we go on a little farther, and come back to it. For clearlythis marked insistence on the power of the true episcopate is tomake us feel more weightily what is to be charged against the falseclaimants of episcopate; or generally, against false claimants ofpower and rank in the body of the clergy; they who, "for theirbellies' sake, creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold."

Never think Milton uses those three words to fill up his verse, as aloose writer would. He needs all the three;--especially thosethree, and no more than those--"creep," and "intrude," and "climb;"no other words would or could serve the turn, and no more could beadded. For they exhaustively comprehend the three classes,correspondent to the three characters, of men who dishonestly seekecclesiastical power. First, those who "CREEP" into the fold; whodo not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and doall things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility ofoffice or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, andunawares direct, the minds of men. Then those who "intrude"(thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by natural insolenceof heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverantself-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the common crowd.Lastly, those who "climb," who, by labour and learning, both stoutand sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition,gain high dignities and authorities, and become "lords over theheritage," though not "ensamples to the flock."

Now go on:-

"Of other care they little reckoning make,Than how to scramble at the shearers' feast.BLIND MOUTHS--"

I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor,one might think, careless and unscholarly.

Not so: its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make uslook close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllablesexpress the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in thetwo great offices of the Church--those of bishop and pastor.

A "Bishop" means "a person who sees."

A "Pastor" means "a person who feeds."

The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to beBlind.

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be fed,--tobe a Mouth.

Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind mouths." We mayadvisably follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils inthe Church have arisen from bishops desiring POWER more than LIGHT.They want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is notto rule; though it may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke: it isthe king's office to rule; the bishop's office is to OVERSEE theflock; to number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give fullaccount of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of the souls,if he has not so much as numbered the bodies, of his flock. Thefirst thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is at least to puthimself in a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain thehistory, from childhood, of every living soul in his diocese, and ofits present state. Down in that back street, Bill, and Nancy,knocking each other's teeth out!--Does the bishop know all about it?Has he his eye upon them? Has he HAD his eye upon them? Can hecircumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit ofbeating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop, thoughhe had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop,--hehas sought to be at the helm instead of the masthead; he has nosight of things. "Nay," you say, "it is not his duty to look afterBill in the back street." What! the fat sheep that have fullfleeces--you think it is only those he should look after while (goback to your Milton) "the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothingabout it), "daily devours apace, and nothing said"?

"But that's not our idea of a bishop." {7} Perhaps not; but it wasSt. Paul's; and it was Milton's. They may be right, or we may be;but we must not think we are reading either one or the other byputting our meaning into their words.

I go on.

"But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw."

This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are not lookedafter in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritualfood."

And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual food; theyare only swollen with wind." At first you may think that is acoarse type, and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literallyaccurate one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and findout the meaning of "Spirit." It is only a contraction of the Latinword "breath," and an indistinct translation of the Greek word for"wind." The same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth whereit listeth;" and in writing, "So is every one that is born of theSpirit;" born of the BREATH, that is; for it means the breath ofGod, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it in our words"inspiration" and "expire." Now, there are two kinds of breath withwhich the flock may be filled,--God's breath, and man's. The breathof God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heavenis to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath--the word which HEcalls spiritual,--is disease and contagion to them, as the fog ofthe fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as adead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This isliterally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last,and fatalest sign of it, is that "puffing up." Your convertedchildren, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, whoteach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived incretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to thefact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiarpeople and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small andgreat, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far asthey think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong;and, pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can besaved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word insteadof act, and wish instead of work;--these are the true fog children--clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapourand skin, without blood or flesh: blown bag-pipes for the fiends topipe with--corrupt, and corrupting,--" Swollen with wind, and therank mist they draw."

Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of the keys,for now we can understand them. Note the difference between Miltonand Dante in their interpretation of this power: for once, thelatter is weaker in thought; he supposes BOTH the keys to be of thegate of heaven; one is of gold, the other of silver: they are givenby St. Peter to the sentinel angel; and it is not easy to determinethe meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the gate,or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key ofheaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison in which thewicked teachers are to be bound who "have taken away the key ofknowledge, yet entered not in themselves."

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see, andfeed; and of all who do so it is said, "He that watereth, shall bewatered also himself." But the reverse is truth also. He thatwatereth not, shall be WITHERED himself; and he that seeth not,shall himself be shut out of sight--shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter: he who isto be bound in heaven must first be bound on earth. That command tothe strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, "Takehim, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in itsmeasure, against the teacher, for every help withheld, and for everytruth refused, and for every falsehood enforced; so that he is morestrictly fettered the more he fetters, and farther outcast as hemore and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage closeupon him, and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts amain."

We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more isyet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of exampleof the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which isrightly called "reading;" watching every accent and expression, andputting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our ownpersonality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be ableassuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus I thought, inmisreading Milton." And by this process you will gradually come toattach less weight to your own "Thus I thought" at other times. Youwill begin to perceive that what YOU thought was a matter of noserious importance;--that your thoughts on any subject are notperhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon:-in fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot besaid to have any "thoughts" at all; that you have no materials forthem, in any serious matters; {8}--no right to "think," but only totry to learn more of the facts. Nay, most probably all your life(unless, as I said, you are a singular person) you will have nolegitimate right to an "opinion" on any business, except thatinstantly under your hand. What must of necessity be done, you canalways find out, beyond question, how to do. Have you a house tokeep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to plough, a ditch tocleanse? There need be no two opinions about these proceedings; itis at your peril if you have not much more than an "opinion" on theway to manage such matters. And also, outside of your own business,there are one or two subjects on which you are bound to have but oneopinion. That roguery and lying are objectionable, and areinstantly to be flogged out of the way whenever discovered;--thatcovetousness and love of quarrelling are dangerous dispositions evenin children, and deadly dispositions in men and nations;--that, inthe end, the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kindpeople, and hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones;--on thesegeneral facts you are bound to have but one, and that a very strong,opinion. For the rest, respecting religions, governments, sciences,arts, you will find that, on the whole, you can know NOTHING,--judgenothing; that the best you can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is to be silent, and strive to be wiser every day,and to understand a little more of the thoughts of others, which sosoon as you try to do honestly, you will discover that the thoughtseven of the wisest are very little more than pertinent questions.To put the difficulty into a clear shape, and exhibit to you thegrounds for INdecision, that is all they can generally do for you!--and well for them and for us, if indeed they are able "to mix themusic with our thoughts and sadden us with heavenly doubts." Thiswriter, from whom I have been reading to you, is not among the firstor wisest: he sees shrewdly as far as he sees, and therefore it iseasy to find out its full meaning; but with the greater men, youcannot fathom their meaning; they do not even wholly measure itthemselves,--it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you, for instance,to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead of Milton's on thismatter of Church authority?--or for Dante's? Have any of you, atthis instant, the least idea what either thought about it? Have youever balanced the scene with the bishops in 'Richard III.' againstthe character of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St.Dominic against that of him who made Virgil wonder to gaze uponhim,--"disteso, tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio;" or of him whomDante stood beside, "come 'l frate che confessa lo perfidoassassin?" {9} Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better than mostof us, I presume! They were both in the midst of the main strugglebetween the temporal and spiritual powers. They had an opinion, wemay guess. But where is it? Bring it into court! PutShakespeare's or Dante's creed into articles, and send IT up fortrial by the Ecclesiastical Courts!

You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and many a day, tocome at the real purposes and teaching of these great men; but avery little honest study of them will enable you to perceive thatwhat you took for your own "judgment" was mere chance prejudice, anddrifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought; nay, you willsee that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough heathwilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrownwith pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evilsurmise; that the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself,is eagerly and scornfully to set fire to THIS; burn all the jungleinto wholesome ash-heaps, and then plough and sow. All the trueliterary work before you, for life, must begin with obedience tothat order, "Break up your fallow ground, and SOW NOT AMONG THORNS."

II. {10} Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers,that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higheradvance to make;--you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go tothem first for clear sight, so you must stay with them, that you mayshare at last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, or"sensation." I am not afraid of the word; still less of the thing.You have heard many outcries against sensation lately; but, I cantell you, it is not less sensation we want, but more. The ennoblingdifference between one man and another,--between one animal andanother,--is precisely in this, that one feels more than another.If we were sponges, perhaps sensation might not be easily got forus; if we were earth-worms, liable at every instant to be cut in twoby the spade, perhaps too much sensation might not be good for us.But being human creatures, IT IS good for us; nay, we are only humanin so far as we are sensitive, and our honour is precisely inproportion to our passion.

You know I said of that great and pure society of the Dead, that itwould allow "no vain or vulgar person to enter there." What do youthink I meant by a "vulgar" person? What do you yourselves mean by"vulgarity"? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but,briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation.Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undevelopedbluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is adreadful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of everysort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure,without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and thedead heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, thatmen become vulgar; they are for ever vulgar, precisely in proportionas they are incapable of sympathy,--of quick understanding,--of allthat, in deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, maybe called the "tact" or "touch-faculty," of body and soul: thattact which the Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has aboveall creatures;--fineness and fulness of sensation, beyond reason;--the guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determinewhat is true:- it is the God-given passion of humanity which alonecan recognise what God has made good.

We come then to that great concourse of the Dead, not merely to knowfrom them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is just.Now, to feel with them, we must be like them; and none of us canbecome that without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined andtested knowledge,--not the first thought that comes, so the truepassion is disciplined and tested passion,--not the first passionthat comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, thetreacherous; if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far,in vain pursuit, in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purposeand no true passion left. Not that any feeling possible to humanityis in itself wrong, but only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobilityis in its force and justice; it is wrong when it is weak, and feltfor paltry cause. There is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees ajuggler tossing golden balls; and this is base, if you will. But doyou think that the wonder is ignoble, or the sensation less, withwhich every human soul is called to watch the golden balls of heaventossed through the night by the Hand that made them? There is amean curiosity, as of a child opening a forbidden door, or a servantprying into her master's business;--and a noble curiosity,questioning, in the front of danger, the source of the great riverbeyond the sand,--the place of the great continents beyond the sea;--a nobler curiosity still, which questions of the source of theRiver of Life, and of the space of the Continent of Heaven,--thingswhich "the angels desire to look into." So the anxiety is ignoble,with which you linger over the course and catastrophe of an idletale; but do you think the anxiety is less, or greater, with whichyou watch, or OUGHT to watch, the dealings of fate and destiny withthe life of an agonized nation? Alas! it is the narrowness,selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to deplorein England at this day;--sensation which spends itself in bouquetsand speeches: in revellings and junketings; in sham fights and gaypuppet shows, while you can look on and see noble nations murdered,man by man, without an effort or a tear.

I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but it wouldhave been enough to have said "injustice" or "unrighteousness" ofsensation. For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discernedfrom a vulgar person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nationshave been) better to be discerned from a mob, than in this,--thattheir feelings are constant and just, results of due contemplation,and of equal thought. You can talk a mob into anything; itsfeelings may be--usually are--on the whole, generous and right; butit has no foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease ortickle it into any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, forthe most part, catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothingso little that it will not roar itself wild about, when the fit ison;--nothing so great but it will forget in an hour, when the fit ispast. But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, passions are just,measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does notspend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighingevidence of a single ruffian's having done a single murder; and fora couple of years see its own children murder each other by theirthousands or tens of thousands a day, considering only what theeffect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring no wise todetermine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither does agreat nation send its poor little boys to jail for stealing sixwalnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds ofthousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's savings,to close their doors "under circumstances over which they have nocontrol," with a "by your leave;" and large landed estates to bebought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamersup and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, andaltering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the commonhighwayman's demand of "your money OR your life," into that of "yourmoney AND your life." Neither does a great nation allow the livesof its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, androtted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence alife extra per week to its landlords; {11} and then debate, withdrivelling tears, and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought notpiously to save, and nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers.Also, a great nation having made up its mind that hanging is quitethe wholesomest process for its homicides in general, can yet withmercy distinguish between the degrees of guilt in homicides; anddoes not yelp like a pack of frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, or grey-haired clodpate Othello,"perplexed i' the extreme," at the very moment that it is sending aMinister of the Crown to make polite speeches to a man who isbayoneting young girls in their fathers' sight, and killing nobleyouths in cool blood, faster than a country butcher kills lambs inspring. And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven and itsPowers, by pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the loveof money to be the root of ALL evil, and declaring, at the sametime, that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chiefnational deeds and measures, by no other love. {12}

My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading.We want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at allevents, be assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for apeople with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writeris intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible forthe English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtfulwriting,--so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity ofavarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than thisincapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; wering true still, when anything strikes home to us; and though theidea that everything should "pay" has infected our every purpose sodeeply, that even when we would play the good Samaritan, we nevertake out our two pence and give them to the host, without saying,"When I come again, thou shalt give me fourpence," there is acapacity of noble passion left in our hearts' core. We show it inour work--in our war,--even in those unjust domestic affectionswhich make us furious at a small private wrong, while we are politeto a boundless public one: we are still industrious to the lasthour of the day, though we add the gambler's fury to the labourer'spatience; we are still brave to the death, though incapable ofdiscerning true cause for battle; and are still true in affection toour own flesh, to the death, as the sea-monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation while this can be still saidof it. As long as it holds its life in its hand, ready to give itfor its honour (though a foolish honour), for its love (though aselfish love), and for its business (though a base business), thereis hope for it. But hope only; for this instinctive, recklessvirtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a mob ofitself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its passions,and direct them, or they will discipline it, one day, with scorpionwhips. Above all, a nation cannot last as a money-making mob: itcannot with impunity,--it cannot with existence,--go on despisingliterature, despising science, despising art, despising nature,despising compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do youthink these are harsh or wild words? Have patience with me but alittle longer. I will prove their truth to you, clause by clause.

(I.) I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as anation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogetheron our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spendon our horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library, you callhim mad--a bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horsemaniac,though men ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do nothear of people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lowerstill, how much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of theUnited Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared withthe contents of its wine-cellars? What position would itsexpenditure on literature take, as compared with its expenditure onluxurious eating? We talk of food for the mind, as of food for thebody: now a good book contains such food inexhaustibly; it is aprovision for life, and for the best part of us; yet how long mostpeople would look at the best book before they would give the priceof a large turbot for it? Though there have been men who havepinched their stomachs and bared their backs to buy a book, whoselibraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than most men'sdinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more the pity;for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us if ithas been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were halfso costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of whatbracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspectthere was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling:whereas the very cheapness of literature is making even wise peopleforget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No bookis worth anything which is not worth MUCH; nor is it serviceable,until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; andmarked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it, as asoldier can seize the weapon he needs in an armoury, or a housewifebring the spice she needs from her store. Bread of flour is good;but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a goodbook; and the family must be poor indeed, which, once in theirlives, cannot, for, such multipliable barley-loaves, pay theirbaker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthyand foolish enough to thumb each other's books out of circulatinglibraries!

(II.) I say we have despised science. "What!" you exclaim, "are wenot foremost in all discovery, {13} and is not the whole world giddyby reason, or unreason, of our inventions?" Yes; but do you supposethat is national work? That work is all done IN SPITE OF thenation; by private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough,indeed, to make our profit of science; we snap up anything in theway of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough; but ifthe scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to US, that isanother story. What have we publicly done for science? We areobliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of our ships, andtherefore we pay for an observatory; and we allow ourselves, in theperson of our Parliament, to be annually tormented into doingsomething, in a slovenly way, for the British Museum; sullenlyapprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, toamuse our children. If anybody will pay for their own telescope,and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if itwere our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenlyperceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else than aportion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and tells us where thegold is, and where the coals, we understand that there is some usein that; and very properly knight him: but is the accident of hishaving found out how to employ himself usefully any credit to US?(The negation of such discovery among his brother squires mayperhaps be some discredit to us, if we would consider of it.) Butif you doubt these generalities, here is one fact for us all tomeditate upon, illustrative of our love of science. Two years agothere was a collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold inBavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique forperfectness, and one unique as an example of a species (a wholekingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil).This collection, of which the mere market worth, among privatebuyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundredpounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred: but wewould not give seven hundred, and the whole series would have beenin the Munich Museum at this moment, if Professor Owen {14} had not,with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the Britishpublic in person of its representatives, got leave to give fourhundred pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the otherthree! which the said public will doubtless pay him eventually, butsulkily, and caring nothing about the matter all the while; onlyalways ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I begof you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annualexpenditure for public purposes, (a third of it for militaryapparatus,) is at least 50 millions. Now 700L. is to 50,000,000L.roughly, as seven pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, agentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjecturedfrom the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park-wallsand footmen only, professes himself fond of science; and that one ofhis servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection offossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for thesum of seven pence sterling; and that the gentleman who is fond ofscience, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, afterkeeping his servant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give youfourpence for them, if you will be answerable for the extrathreepence yourself, till next year!"

(III.) I say you have despised Art! "What!" you again answer,"have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we not paythousands of pounds for single pictures? and have we not Art schoolsand institutions,--more than ever nation had before?" Yes, truly,but all that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sellcanvas as well as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you wouldtake every other nation's bread out of its mouth if you could; {15}not being able to do that, your ideal of life is to stand in thethoroughfares of the world, like Ludgate apprentices, screaming toevery passer-by, "What d'ye lack?" You know nothing of your ownfaculties or circumstances; you fancy that, among your damp, flat,fat fields of clay, you can have as quick art-fancy as the Frenchmanamong his bronzed vines, or the Italian under his volcanic cliffs;--that Art may be learned, as book-keeping is, and when learned, willgive you more books to keep. You care for pictures, absolutely, nomore than you do for the bills pasted on your dead walls. There isalways room on the walls for the bills to be read,--never for thepictures to be seen. You do not know what pictures you have (byrepute) in the country, nor whether they are false or true, norwhether they are taken care of or not; in foreign countries, youcalmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world rotting inabandoned wreck--(in Venice you saw the Austrian guns deliberatelypointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard that allthe fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow onthe Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so much as the chanceof a brace or two of game less in your own bags, in a day'sshooting. That is your national love of Art.

(IV.) You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep andsacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionistsmade stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-coursesof the cathedrals of the earth. Your ONE conception of pleasure isto drive in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off theiraltars. {16} You have put a railroad-bridge over the falls ofSchaffhausen. You have tunnelled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell'schapel; you have destroyed the Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva;there is not a quiet valley in England that you have not filled withbellowing fire; there is no particle left of English land which youhave not trampled coal ashes into {17}--nor any foreign city inwhich the spread of your presence is not marked among its fair oldstreets and happy gardens by a consuming white leprosy of new hotelsand perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves, which your own poetsused to love so reverently, you look upon as soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb and slide down again, with"shrieks of delight." When you are past shrieking, having no humanarticulate voice to say you are glad with, you fill the quietude oftheir valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush home, red withcutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with convulsive hiccoughof self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two sorrowfullestspectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep innersignificance of them, are the English mobs in the valley ofChamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and theSwiss vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian thanks for thegift of the vine, by assembling in knots in the "towers of thevineyards," and slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morningtill evening. It is pitiful, to have dim conceptions of duty; morepitiful, it seems to me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.

Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need of words of minefor proof of this. I will merely print one of the newspaperparagraphs which I am in the habit of cutting out and throwing intomy store-drawer; here is one from a 'Daily Telegraph' of an earlydate this year (1867); (date which, though by me carelessly leftunmarked, is easily discoverable; for on the back of the slip thereis the announcement that "yesterday the seventh of the specialservices of this year was performed by the Bishop of Ripon in St.Paul's";) it relates only one of such facts as happen now daily;this by chance having taken a form in which it came before thecoroner. I will print the paragraph in red. Be sure, the factsthemselves are written in that colour, in a book which we shall allOF us, literate or illiterate, have to read our page of, some day.

An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy coroner, atthe White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spitalfields, respecting thedeath of Michael Collins, aged 58 years. Mary Collins, a miserable-looking woman, said that she lived with the deceased and his son ina room at 2, Cobb's Court, Christ Church. Deceased was a"translator" of boots. Witness went out and bought old boots;deceased and his son made them into good ones, and then witness soldthem for what she could get at the shops, which was very littleindeed. Deceased and his son used to work night and day to try andget a little bread and tea, and pay for the room (2S. a week), so asto keep the home together. On Friday-night-week deceased got upfrom his bench and began to shiver. He threw down the boots,saying, "Somebody else must finish them when I am gone, for I can dono more." There was no fire, and he said, "I would be better if Iwas warm." Witness therefore took two pairs of translated boots{18} to sell at the shop, but she could only get 14D. for the twopairs, for the people at the shop said, "We must have our profit."Witness got 14lb. of coal, and a little tea and bread. Her son satup the whole night to make the "translations," to get money, butdeceased died on Saturday morning. The family never had enough toeat.--Coroner: "It seems to me deplorable that you did not go intothe workhouse." Witness: "We wanted the comforts of our littlehome." A juror asked what the comforts were, for he only saw alittle straw in the corner of the room, the windows of which werebroken. The witness began to cry, and said that they had a quiltand other little things. The deceased said he never would go intothe workhouse. In summer, when the season was good, they sometimesmade as much as 10S. profit in the week. They then always savedtowards the next week, which was generally a bad one. In winterthey made not half so much. For three years they had been gettingfrom bad to worse.--Cornelius Collins said that he had assisted hisfather since 1847. They used to work so far into the night thatboth nearly lost their eyesight. Witness now had a film over hiseyes. Five years ago deceased applied to the parish for aid. Therelieving officer gave him a 4lb. loaf, and told him if he cameagain he should "get the stones." {19} That disgusted deceased, andhe would have nothing to do with them since. They got worse andworse until last Friday week, when they had not even a half-penny tobuy a candle. Deceased then lay down on the straw, and said hecould not live till morning.--A juror: "You are dying of starvationyourself, and you ought to go into the house until the summer."--Witness: "If we went in we should die. When we come out in thesummer we should be like people dropped from the sky. No one wouldknow us, and we would not have even a room. I could work now if Ihad food, for my sight would get better." Dr. G. P. Walker saiddeceased died from syncope, from exhaustion from want of food. Thedeceased had had no bedclothes. For four months he had had nothingbut bread to eat. There was not a particle of fat in the body.There was no disease, but, if there had been medical attendance, hemight have survived the syncope or fainting. The Coroner havingremarked upon the painful nature of the case, the jury returned thefollowing verdict: "That deceased died from exhaustion from want offood and the common necessaries of life; also through want ofmedical aid."

"Why would witness not go into the workhouse?" you ask. Well, thepoor seem to have a prejudice against the workhouse which the richhave not; for of course everyone who takes a pension from Governmentgoes into the workhouse on a grand scale: {20} only the workhousesfor the rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be calledplay-houses. But the poor like to die independently, it appears;perhaps if we made the play-houses for them pretty and pleasantenough, or gave them their pensions at home, and allowed them alittle introductory peculation with the public money, their mindsmight be reconciled to the conditions. Meantime, here are thefacts: we make our relief either so insulting to them, or sopainful, that they rather die than take it at our hands; or, forthird alternative, we leave them so untaught and foolish that theystarve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not knowing what to do,or what to ask. I say, you despise compassion; if you did not, sucha newspaper paragraph would be as impossible in a Christian countryas a deliberate assassination permitted in its public streets. {21}"Christian," did I say? Alas! if we were but wholesomely UN-Christian, it would be impossible: it is our imaginary Christianitythat helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and luxuriate inour faith, for the lewd sensation of it; dressing IT up, likeeverything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the organand aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival--the Christianity,which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with ourplay about the devil, in our Satanellas,--Roberts,--Fausts; chantinghymns through traceried windows for background effect, andartistically modulating the "Dio" through variation on variation ofmimicked prayer: (while we distribute tracts, next day, for thebenefit of uncultivated swearers, upon what we suppose to be thesignification of the Third Commandment;-) this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired Christianity, we are triumphant in, and draw back the hemof our robes from the touch of the heretics who dispute it. But todo a piece of common Christian righteousness in a plain English wordor deed; to make Christian law any rule of life, and found oneNational act or hope thereon,--we know too well what our faith comesto for that! You might sooner get lightning out of incense smokethan true action or passion out of your modern English religion.You had better get rid of the smoke, and the organ pipes, both:leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the painted glass, to theproperty man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in one healthyexpiration, and look after Lazarus at the doorstep. For there is atrue Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and that isthe only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be.

All these pleasures then, and all these virtues, I repeat, younationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you who do not; bywhose work, by whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, youlive, and never thank them. Your wealth, your amusement, yourpride, would all be alike impossible, but for those whom you scornor forget. The policeman, who is walking up and down the black laneall night to watch the guilt you have created there; and may havehis brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at any moment, andnever be thanked; the sailor wrestling with the sea's rage; thequiet student poring over his book or his vial; the common worker,without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his task asyour horses drag your carts, hopeless, and spurned of all: theseare the men by whom England lives; but they are not the nation; theyare only the body and nervous force of it, acting still from oldhabit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. OurNational wish and purpose are only to be amused; our Nationalreligion is the performance of church ceremonies, and preaching ofsoporific truth (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, whilewe amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement isfastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched throat andwandering eyes--senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally thatword DIS-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses theentire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of theirwork, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;--when they arefaithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions becomesteady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the naturalpulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour ourwhole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; andhaving no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up forus to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, butguiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures oncavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The justice we do notexecute, we mimic in the novel and on the stage; for the beauty wedestroy in nature, we substitute the metamorphosis of the pantomime,and (the human nature of us imperatively requiring awe and sorrow ofSOME kind) for the noble grief we should have borne with ourfellows, and the pure tears we should have wept with them, we gloatover the pathos of the police court, and gather the night-dew of thegrave.

It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these things;the facts are frightful enough;--the measure of national faultinvolved in them is perhaps not as great as it would at first seem.We permit, or cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we mean no harm;we set fire to houses, and ravage peasants' fields, yet we should besorry to find we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart;still capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at theend of his long life, having had much power with the public, beingplagued in some serious matter by a reference to "public opinion,"uttered the impatient exclamation, "The public is just a greatbaby!" And the reason that I have allowed all these graver subjectsof thought to mix themselves up with an inquiry into methods ofreading, is that, the more I see of our national faults or miseries,the more they resolve themselves into conditions of childishilliterateness and want of education in the most ordinary habits ofthought. It is, I repeat, not vice, not selfishness, not dulness ofbrain, which we have to lament; but an unreachable schoolboy'srecklessness, only differing from the true schoolboy's in itsincapacity of being helped, because it acknowledges no master.

There is a curious type of us given in one of the lovely, neglectedworks of the last of our great painters. It is a drawing of KirkbyLonsdale churchyard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills, andfolded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of thedead who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, agroup of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, tostrike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the words ofthe dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with ourbitter, reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which thewind scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but uponthe seal of an enchanted vault--nay, the gate of a great city ofsleeping kings, who would awake for us and walk with us, if we knewbut how to call them by their names. How often, even if we lift themarble entrance gate, do we but wander among those old kings intheir repose, and finger the robes they lie in, and stir the crownson their foreheads; and still they are silent to us, and seem but adusty imagery; because we know not the incantation of the heart thatwould wake them;--which, if they once heard, they would start up tomeet us in their power of long ago, narrowly to look upon us, andconsider us; and, as the fallen kings of Hades meet the newlyfallen, saying, "Art thou also become weak as we--art thou alsobecome one of us?" so would these kings, with their undimmed,unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, "Art thou also become pure andmighty of heart as we--art thou also become one of us?"

Mighty of heart, mighty of mind--"magnanimous"--to be this, isindeed to be great in life; to become this increasingly, is, indeed,to "advance in life,"--in life itself--not in the trappings of it.My friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, when the headof a house died? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set inhis chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses; and each ofthem placed him at his table's head, and all feasted in hispresence? Suppose it were offered to you in plain words, as it ISoffered to you in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythianhonour, gradually, while you yet thought yourself alive. Supposethe offer were this: You shall die slowly; your blood shall dailygrow cold, your flesh petrify, your heart beat at last only as arusted group of iron valves. Your life shall fade from you, andsink through the earth into the ice of Caina; but, day by day, yourbody shall be dressed more gaily, and set in higher chariots, andhave more orders on its breast--crowns on its head, if you will.Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it, crowd after it upand down the streets; build palaces for it, feast with it at theirtables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay enough withinit to know what they do, and feel the weight of the golden dress onits shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the skull;--nomore. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the death-angel?Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet practically andverily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure; many of usgrasp at it in its fulness of horror. Every man accepts it, whodesires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who meansonly that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and morefortune, and more public honour, and--NOT more personal soul. Heonly is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whoseblood warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering intoLiving {22} peace. And the men who have this life in them are thetrue lords or kings of the earth--they, and they only. All otherkingships, so far as they are true, are only the practical issue andexpression of theirs; if less than this, they are either dramaticroyalties,--costly shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels, insteadof tinsel--but still only the toys of nations; or else they are noroyalties at all, but tyrannies, or the mere active and practicalissue of national folly; for which reason I have said of themelsewhere, "Visible governments are the toys of some nations, thediseases of others, the harness of some, the burdens of more."

But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear Kinghood stillspoken of, even among thoughtful men, as if governed nations were apersonal property, and might be bought and sold, or otherwiseacquired, as sheep, of whose flesh their king was to feed, and whosefleece he was to gather; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of basekings, "people-eating," were the constant and proper title of allmonarchs; and the enlargement of a king's dominion meant the samething as the increase of a private man's estate! Kings who thinkso, however powerful, can no more be the true kings of the nationthan gadflies are the kings of a horse; they suck it, and may driveit wild, but do not guide it. They, and their courts, and theirarmies are, if one could see clearly, only a large species of marshmosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-masteredtrumpeting, in the summer air; the twilight being, perhaps,sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glitteringmists of midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly,if at all, and hate ruling; too many of them make "il gran rifiuto;"and if they do not, the mob, as soon as they are likely to becomeuseful to it, is pretty sure to make ITS "gran rifiuto" of THEM.

Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if ever daycomes when he will estimate his dominion by the FORCE of it,--notthe geographical boundaries. It matters very little whether Trentcuts you a cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there.But it does matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily sayto this man, "Go," and he goeth; and to another, "Come," and hecometh. Whether you can turn your people, as you can Trent--andwhere it is that you bid them come, and where go. It matters toyou, king of men, whether your people hate you, and die by you, orlove you, and live by you. You may measure your dominion bymultitudes, better than by miles; and count degrees of love-latitude, not from, but to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator.

Measure!--nay, you cannot measure. Who shall measure the differencebetween the power of those who "do and teach," and who are greatestin the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven--and the power of those whoundo, and consume--whose power, at the fullest, is only the power ofthe moth and the rust? Strange! to think how the Moth-kings lay uptreasures for the moth; and the Rust-kings, who are to theirpeoples' strength as rust to armour, lay up treasures for the rust;and the Robber-kings, treasures for the robber; but how few kingshave ever laid up treasures that needed no guarding--treasures ofwhich, the more thieves there were, the better! Broidered robe,only to be rent; helm and sword, only to be dimmed; jewel and gold,only to be scattered;--there have been three kinds of kings who havegathered these. Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth order ofkings, who had read, in some obscure writing of long ago, that therewas a Fourth kind of treasure, which the jewel and gold could notequal, neither should it be valued with pure gold. A web made fairin the weaving, by Athena's shuttle; an armour, forged in divinefire by Vulcanian force; a gold to be mined in the very sun's redheart, where he sets over the Delphian cliffs;--deep-picturedtissue;--impenetrable armour;--potable gold!--the three great Angelsof Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and waiting atthe posts of our doors, to lead us, with their winged power, andguide us, with their unerring eyes, by the path which no fowlknoweth, and which the vulture's eye has not seen! Suppose kingsshould ever arise, who heard and believed this word, and at lastgathered and brought forth treasures of--Wisdom--for their people?

Think what an amazing business THAT would be! How inconceivable, inthe state of our present national wisdom! That we should bring upour peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet exercise!--organise, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies ofthinkers, instead of armies of stabbers!--find national amusement inreading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds; give prizes for a fair shotat a fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What anabsurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth of thecapitalists of civilised nations should ever come to supportliterature instead of war!

Have yet patience with me, while I read you a single sentence out ofthe only book, properly to be called a book, that I have yet writtenmyself, the one that will stand (if anything stand), surest andlongest of all work of mine.

"It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europe thatit is entirely capitalists' wealth which supports unjust wars. Justwars do not need so much money to support them; for most of the menwho wage such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, men's bodiesand souls have both to be bought; and the best tools of war for thembesides, which make such war costly to the maximum; not to speak ofthe cost of base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations whichhave not grace nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy anhour's peace of mind with; as, at present, France and England,purchasing of each other ten millions sterling worth ofconsternation, annually (a remarkably light crop, half thorns andhalf aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and granaried by the 'science' ofthe modern political economist, teaching covetousness instead oftruth). And, all unjust war being supportable, if not by pillage ofthe enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these loans are repaid bysubsequent taxation of the people, who appear to have no will in thematter, the capitalists' will being the primary root of the war; butits real root is the covetousness of the whole nation, rendering itincapable of faith, frankness, or justice, and bringing about,therefore, in due time, his own separate loss and punishment to eachperson."

France and England literally, observe, buy PANIC of each other; theypay, each of them, for ten thousand-thousand-pounds'-worth ofterror, a year. Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions'worth of panic annually, they made up their minds to be at peacewith each other, and buy ten millions' worth of knowledge annually;and that each nation spent its ten thousand thousand pounds a yearin founding royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums,royal gardens, and places of rest. Might it not be better somewhatfor both French and English?

It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Nevertheless, Ihope it will not be long before royal or national libraries will befounded in every considerable city, with a royal series of books inthem; the same series in every one of them, chosen books, the bestin every kind, prepared for that national series in the most perfectway possible; their text printed all on leaves of equal size, broadof margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand,beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples of binders' work;and that these great libraries will be accessible to all clean andorderly persons at all times of the day and evening; strict lawbeing enforced for this cleanliness and quietness.

I could shape for you other plans, for art-galleries, and fornatural history galleries, and for many precious--many, it seems tome, needful--things; but this book plan is the easiest andneedfullest, and would prove a considerable tonic to what we callour British constitution, which has fallen dropsical of late, andhas an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding.You have got its corn laws repealed for it; try if you cannot getcorn laws established for it, dealing in a better bread;--bread madeof that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors;--doors not of robbers', but of Kings' Treasuries.

LECTURE II.--LILIES OF QUEENS' GARDENS

"Be thou glad, oh thirsting Desert; let the desert be made cheerful,and bloom as the lily; and the barren places of Jordan shall runwild with wood."--ISAIAH XXXV. I. (Septuagint.)

It will, perhaps, be well, as this Lecture is the sequel of onepreviously given, that I should shortly state to you my generalintention in both. The questions specially proposed to you in thefirst, namely, How and What to Read, rose out of a far deeper one,which it was my endeavour to make you propose earnestly toyourselves, namely, WHY to Read. I want you to feel, with me, thatwhatever advantages we possess in the present day in the diffusionof education and of literature, can only be rightly used by any ofus when we have apprehended clearly what education is to lead to,and literature to teach. I wish you to see that both well-directedmoral training and well-chosen reading lead to the possession of apower over the ill-guided and illiterate, which is, according to themeasure of it, in the truest sense, KINGLY; conferring indeed thepurest kingship that can exist among men: too many other kingships(however distinguished by visible insignia or material power) beingeither spectral, or tyrannous;--spectral--that is to say, aspectsand shadows only of royalty, hollow as death, and which only the"likeness of a kingly crown have on:" or else--tyrannous--that is tosay, substituting their own will for the law of justice and love bywhich all true kings rule.

There is, then, I repeat--and as I want to leave this idea with you,I begin with it, and shall end with it--only one pure kind ofkingship; an inevitable and eternal kind, crowned or not; thekingship, namely, which consists in a stronger moral state, and atruer thoughtful state, than that of others; enabling you,therefore, to guide, or to raise them. Observe that word "State;"we have got into a loose way of using it. It means literally thestanding and stability of a thing; and you have the full force of itin the derived word "statue"--"the immovable thing." A king'smajesty or "state," then, and the right of his kingdom to be calleda state, depends on the movelessness of both:- without tremor,without quiver of balance; established and enthroned upon afoundation of eternal law which nothing can alter, nor overthrow.

Believing that all literature and all education are only useful sofar as they tend to confirm this calm, beneficent, and THEREFOREkingly, power--first, over ourselves, and, through ourselves, overall around us,--I am now going to ask you to consider with mefarther, what special portion or kind of this royal authority,arising out of noble education, may rightly be possessed by women;and how far they also are called to a true queenly power,--not intheir households merely, but over all within their sphere. And inwhat sense, if they rightly understood and exercised this royal orgracious influence, the order and beauty induced by such benignantpower would justify us in speaking of the territories over whicheach of them reigned, as "Queens' Gardens."

And here, in the very outset, we are met by a far deeper question,which--strange though this may seem--remains among many of us yetquite undecided in spite of its infinite importance.

We cannot determine what the queenly power of women should be, untilwe are agreed what their ordinary power should be. We cannotconsider how education may fit them for any widely extending duty,until we are agreed what is their true constant duty. And therenever was a time when wilder words were spoken, or more vainimagination permitted, respecting this question--quite vital to allsocial happiness. The relations of the womanly to the manly nature,their different capacities of intellect or of virtue, seem never tohave been yet estimated with entire consent. We hear of the"mission" and of the "rights" of Woman, as if these could ever beseparate from the mission and the rights of Man--as if she and herlord were creatures of independent kind, and of irreconcilableclaim. This, at least, is wrong. And not less wrong--perhaps evenmore foolishly wrong (for I will anticipate thus far what I hope toprove)--is the idea that woman is only the shadow and attendantimage of her lord, owing him a thoughtless and servile obedience,and supported altogether in her weakness by the pre-eminence of hisfortitude.

This, I say, is the most foolish of all errors respecting her whowas made to be the helpmate of man. As if he could be helpedeffectively by a shadow, or worthily by a slave!

Let us try, then, whether we cannot get at some clear and harmoniousidea (it must be harmonious if it is true) of what womanly mind andvirtue are in power and office, with respect to man's; and how theirrelations, rightly accepted, aid and increase the vigour and honourand authority of both.

And now I must repeat one thing I said in the last lecture: namely,that the first use of education was to enable us to consult with thewisest and the greatest men on all points of earnest difficulty.That to use books rightly, was to go to them for help: to appeal tothem, when our own knowledge and power of thought failed: to be ledby them into wider sight,--purer conception,--than our own, andreceive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils ofall time, against our solitary and unstable opinion.

Let us do this now. Let us see whether the greatest, the wisest,the purest-hearted of all ages are agreed in any wise on this point:let us hear the testimony they have left respecting what they heldto be the true dignity of woman, and her mode of help to man.

And first let us take Shakespeare.

Note broadly in the outset, Shakespeare has no heroes;--he has onlyheroines. There is not one entirely heroic figure in all his plays,except the slight sketch of Henry the Fifth, exaggerated for thepurposes of the stage; and the still slighter Valentine in The TwoGentlemen of Verona. In his laboured and perfect plays you have nohero. Othello would have been one, if his simplicity had not beenso great as to leave him the prey of every base practice round him;but he is the only example even approximating to the heroic type.Coriolanus--Caesar--Antony stand in flawed strength, and fall bytheir vanities;--Hamlet is indolent, and drowsily speculative; Romeoan impatient boy; the Merchant of Venice languidly submissive toadverse fortune; Kent, in King Lear, is entirely noble at heart, buttoo rough and unpolished to be of true use at the critical time, andhe sinks into the office of a servant only. Orlando, no less noble,is yet the despairing toy of chance, followed, comforted, saved byRosalind. Whereas there is hardly a play that has not a perfectwoman in it, steadfast in grave hope, and errorless purpose:Cordelia, Desdemona, Isabella, Hermione, Imogen, Queen Catherine,Perdita, Sylvia, Viola, Rosalind, Helena, and last, and perhapsloveliest, Virgilia, are all faultless; conceived in the highestheroic type of humanity.

Then observe, secondly,

The catastrophe of every play is caused always by the folly or faultof a man; the redemption, if there be any, is by the wisdom andvirtue of a woman, and, failing that, there is none. Thecatastrophe of King Lear is owing to his own want of judgment, hisimpatient vanity, his misunderstanding of his children; the virtueof his one true daughter would have saved him from all the injuriesof the others, unless he had cast her away from him; as it is, sheall but saves him.

Of Othello I need not trace the tale;--nor the one weakness of hisso mighty love; nor the inferiority of his perceptive intellect tothat even of the second woman character in the play, the Emilia whodies in wild testimony against his error:-

"Oh, murderous coxcomb! what should such a foolDo with so good a wife?"

In Romeo and Juliet, the wise and brave stratagem of the wife isbrought to ruinous issue by the reckless impatience of her husband.In Winter's Tale, and in Cymbeline, the happiness and existence oftwo princely households, lost through long years, and imperilled tothe death by the folly and obstinacy of the husbands, are redeemedat last by the queenly patience and wisdom of the wives. In Measurefor Measure, the foul injustice of the judge, and the foul cowardiceof the brother, are opposed to the victorious truth and adamantinepurity of a woman. In Coriolanus, the mother's counsel, acted uponin time, would have saved her son from all evil; his momentaryforgetfulness of it is his ruin; her prayer, at last granted, saveshim--not, indeed, from death, but from the curse of living as thedestroyer of his country.

And what shall I say of Julia, constant against the fickleness of alover who is a mere wicked child?--of Helena, against the petulanceand insult of a careless youth?--of the patience of Hero, thepassion of Beatrice, and the calmly devoted wisdom of the"unlessoned girl," who appears among the helplessness, theblindness, and the vindictive passions of men, as a gentle angel,bringing courage and safety by her presence, and defeating the worstmalignities of crime by what women are fancied most to fail in,--precision and accuracy of thought.

Observe, further, among all the principal figures in Shakespeare'splays, there is only one weak woman--Ophelia; and it is because shefails Hamlet at the critical moment, and is not, and cannot in hernature be, a guide to him when he needs her most, that all thebitter catastrophe follows. Finally, though there are three wickedwomen among the principal figures--Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril--they are felt at once to be frightful exceptions to the ordinarylaws of life; fatal in their influence also, in proportion to thepower for good which they have abandoned.

Such, in broad light, is Shakespeare's testimony to the position andcharacter of women in human life. He represents them as infalliblyfaithful and wise counsellors,--incorruptibly just and pureexamples--strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save.

Not as in any wise comparable in knowledge of the nature of man,--still less in his understanding of the causes and courses of fate,--but only as the writer who has given us the broadest view of theconditions and modes of ordinary thought in modern society, I askyou next to receive the witness of Walter Scott.

I put aside his merely romantic prose writings as of no value, andthough the early romantic poetry is very beautiful, its testimony isof no weight, other than that of a boy's ideal. But his true works,studied from Scottish life, bear a true witness; and in the wholerange of these, there are but three men who reach the heroic type{23}--Dandie Dinmont, Rob Roy, and Claverhouse; of these, one is aborder farmer; another a freebooter; the third a soldier in a badcause. And these touch the ideal of heroism only in their courageand faith, together with a strong, but uncultivated, or mistakenlyapplied, intellectual power; while his younger men are thegentlemanly play-things of fantastic fortune, and only by aid (oraccident) of that fortune, survive, not vanquish, the trials theyinvoluntarily sustain. Of any disciplined, or consistent character,earnest in a purpose wisely conceived, or dealing with forms ofhostile evil, definitely challenged and resolutely subdued, there isno trace in his conceptions of young men. Whereas in hisimaginations of women,--in the characters of Ellen Douglas, of FloraMacIvor, Rose Bradwardine, Catherine Seyton, Diana Vernon, LiliasRedgauntlet, Alice Bridgenorth, Alice Lee, and Jeanie Deans,--withendless varieties of grace, tenderness, and intellectual power, wefind in all a quite infallible sense of dignity and justice; afearless, instant, and untiring self-sacrifice, to even theappearance of duty, much more to its real claims; and, finally, apatient wisdom of deeply-restrained affection, which does infinitelymore than protect its objects from a momentary error; it graduallyforms, animates, and exalts the characters of the unworthy lovers,until, at the close of the tale, we are just able, and no more, totake patience in hearing of their unmerited success.

So that, in all cases, with Scott as with Shakespeare, it is thewoman who watches over, teaches, and guides the youth; it is never,by any chance, the youth who watches over, or educates, hismistress.

Next take, though more briefly, graver testimony--that of the greatItalians and Greeks. You know well the plan of Dante's great poem--that it is a love-poem to his dead lady; a song of praise for herwatch over his soul. Stooping only to pity, never to love, she yetsaves him from destruction--saves him from hell. He is goingeternally astray in despair; she comes down from heaven to his help,and throughout the ascents of Paradise is his teacher, interpretingfor him the most difficult truths, divine and human; and leadinghim, with rebuke upon rebuke, from star to star.

I do not insist upon Dante's conception; if I began I could notcease: besides, you might think this a wild imagination of onepoet's heart. So I will rather read to you a few verses of thedeliberate writing of a knight of Pisa to his living lady, whollycharacteristic of the feeling of all the noblest men of thethirteenth, or early fourteenth, century, preserved among many othersuch records of knightly honour and love, which Dante Rossetti hasgathered for us from among the early Italian poets.

"For lo! thy law is passedThat this my love should manifestly beTo serve and honour thee:And so I do; and my delight is full,Accepted for the servant of thy rule.

"Without almost, I am all rapturous,Since thus my will was setTo serve, thou flower of joy, thine excellence:Nor ever seems it anything could rouseA pain or a regret.

But on thee dwells my every thought and sense;Considering that from thee all virtues spreadAs from a fountain head,--THAT IN THY GIFT IS WISDOM'S BEST AVAIL,AND HONOUR WITHOUT FAIL,With whom each sovereign good dwells separate,Fulfilling the perfection of thy state.

"Lady, since I conceivedThy pleasurable aspect in my heart,MY LIFE HAS BEEN APARTIN SHINING BRIGHTNESS AND THE PLACE OF TRUTH;Which till that time, good sooth,Groped among shadows in a darken'd place,Where many hours and daysIt hardly ever had remember'd good.But now my servitudeIs thine, and I am full of joy and rest.A man from a wild beastThou madest me, since for thy love I lived."

You may think perhaps a Greek knight would have had a lower estimateof women than this Christian lover. His spiritual subjection tothem was indeed not so absolute; but as regards their own personalcharacter, it was only because you could not have followed me soeasily, that I did not take the Greek women instead ofShakespeare's; and instance, for chief ideal types of human beautyand faith, the simple mother's and wife's heart of Andromache; thedivine, yet rejected wisdom of Cassandra; the playful kindness andsimple princess-life of happy Nausicaa; the housewifely calm of thatof Penelope, with its watch upon the sea; the ever patient,fearless, hopelessly devoted piety of the sister, and daughter, inAntigone; the bowing down of Iphigenia, lamb-like and silent; andfinally, the expectation of the resurrection, made clear to the soulof the Greeks in the return from her grave of that Alcestis, who, tosave her husband, had passed calmly through the bitterness of death.

Now I could multiply witness upon witness of this kind upon you if Ihad time. I would take Chaucer, and show you why he wrote a Legendof Good Women; but no Legend of Good Men. I would take Spenser, andshow you how all his fairy knights are sometimes deceived andsometimes vanquished; but the soul of Una is never darkened, and thespear of Britomart is never broken. Nay, I could go back into themythical teaching of the most ancient times, and show you how thegreat people,--by one of whose princesses it was appointed that theLawgiver of all the earth should be educated, rather than by his ownkindred;--how that great Egyptian people, wisest then of nations,gave to their Spirit of Wisdom the form of a Woman; and into herhand, for a symbol, the weaver's shuttle; and how the name and theform of that spirit, adopted, believed, and obeyed by the Greeks,became that Athena of the olive-helm, and cloudy shield, to faith inwhom you owe, down to this date, whatever you hold most precious inart, in literature, or in types of national virtue.

But I will not wander into this distant and mythical element; I willonly ask you to give its legitimate value to the testimony of thesegreat poets and men of the world,--consistent, as you see it is, onthis head. I will ask you whether it can be supposed that thesemen, in the main work of their lives, are amusing themselves with afictitious and idle view of the relations between man and woman;--nay, worse than fictitious or idle; for a thing may be imaginary,yet desirable, if it were possible: but this, their ideal of woman,is, according to our common idea of the marriage relation, whollyundesirable. The woman, we say, is not to guide, nor even to thinkfor herself. The man is always to be the wiser; he is to be thethinker, the ruler, the superior in knowledge and discretion, as inpower.

Is it not somewhat important to make up our minds on this matter?Are all these great men mistaken, or are we? Are Shakespeare andAEschylus, Dante and Homer, merely dressing dolls for us; or, worsethan dolls, unnatural visions, the realization of which, were itpossible, would bring anarchy into all households and ruin into allaffections? Nay, if you can suppose this, take lastly the evidenceof facts, given by the human heart itself. In all Christian ageswhich have been remarkable for their purity or progress, there hasbeen absolute yielding of obedient devotion, by the lover, to hismistress. I say OBEDIENT;--not merely enthusiastic and worshippingin imagination, but entirely subject, receiving from the belovedwoman, however young, not only the encouragement, the praise, andthe reward of all toil, but, so far as any choice is open, or anyquestion difficult of decision, the DIRECTION of all toil. Thatchivalry, to the abuse and dishonour of which are attributableprimarily whatever is cruel in war, unjust in peace, or corrupt andignoble in domestic relations; and to the original purity and powerof which we owe the defence alike of faith, of law, and of love;that chivalry, I say, in its very first conception of honourablelife, assumes the subjection of the young knight to the command--should it even be the command in caprice--of his lady. It assumesthis, because its masters knew that the first and necessary impulseof every truly taught and knightly heart is this of blind service toits lady: that where that true faith and captivity are not, allwayward and wicked passion must be; and that in this rapturousobedience to the single love of his youth, is the sanctification ofall man's strength, and the continuance of all his purposes. Andthis, not because such obedience would be safe, or honourable, wereit ever rendered to the unworthy; but because it ought to beimpossible for every noble youth--it IS impossible for every onerightly trained--to love any one whose gentle counsel he cannottrust, or whose prayerful command he can hesitate to obey.

I do not insist by any farther argument on this, for I think itshould commend itself at once to your knowledge of what has been andto your feeling of what should be. You cannot think that thebuckling on of the knight's armour by his lady's hand was a merecaprice of romantic fashion. It is the type of an eternal truth--that the soul's armour is never well set to the heart unless awoman's hand has braced it; and it is only when she braces itloosely that the honour of manhood fails. Know you not those lovelylines--I would they were learned by all youthful ladies of England:-

"Ah, wasteful woman!--she who mayOn her sweet self set her own price,Knowing he cannot choose but pay -How has she cheapen'd Paradise!How given for nought her priceless gift,How spoiled the bread and spill'd the wine,Which, spent with due respective thrift,Had made brutes men, and men divine!" {24}

Thus much, then, respecting the relations of lovers I believe youwill accept. But what we too often doubt is the fitness of thecontinuance of such a relation throughout the whole of human life.We think it right in the lover and mistress, not in the husband andwife. That is to say, we think that a reverent and tender duty isdue to one whose affection we still doubt, and whose character we asyet do but partially and distantly discern; and that this reverenceand duty are to be withdrawn when the affection has become whollyand limitlessly our own, and the character has been so sifted andtried that we fear not to entrust it with the happiness of ourlives. Do you not see how ignoble this is, as well as howunreasonable? Do you not feel that marriage,--when it is marriageat all,--is only the seal which marks the vowed transition oftemporary into untiring service, and of fitful into eternal love?

But how, you will ask, is the idea of this guiding function of thewoman reconcilable with a true wifely subjection? Simply in that itis a GUIDING, not a determining, function. Let me try to show youbriefly how these powers seem to be rightly distinguishable.

We are foolish, and without excuse foolish, in speaking of the"superiority" of one sex to the other, as if they could be comparedin similar things. Each has what the other has not: each completesthe other, and is completed by the other: they are in nothingalike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on eachasking and receiving from the other what the other only can give.

Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power isactive, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, thecreator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is forspeculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, andfor conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary.But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle,--and herintellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering,arrangement, and decision. She sees the qualities of things, theirclaims, and their places. Her great function is Praise; she entersinto no contest, but infallibly adjudges the crown of contest. Byher office, and place, she is protected from all danger andtemptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, mustencounter all peril and trial;--to him, therefore, must be thefailure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must bewounded, or subdued; often misled; and ALWAYS hardened. But heguards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her,unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, notemptation, no cause of error or offence. This is the true natureof home--it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from allinjury, but from all terror, doubt, and division. In so far as itis not this, it is not home; so far as the anxieties of the outerlife penetrate into it, and the inconsistently-minded, unknown,unloved, or hostile society of the outer world is allowed by eitherhusband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be home; it isthen only a part of that outer world which you have roofed over, andlighted fire in. But so far as it is a sacred place, a vestaltemple, a temple of the hearth watched over by Household Gods,before whose faces none may come but those whom they can receivewith love,--so far as it is this, and roof and fire are types onlyof a nobler shade and light,--shade as of the rock in a weary land,and light as of the Pharos in the stormy sea;--so far it vindicatesthe name, and fulfils the praise, of Home.

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. Thestars only may be over her head; the glowworm in the night-coldgrass may be the only fire at her foot; but home is yet wherever sheis; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better thanceiled with cedar, or painted with vermilion, shedding its quietlight far, for those who else were homeless.

This, then, I believe to be,--will you not admit it to be,--thewoman's true place and power? But do not you see that, to fulfilthis, she must--as far as one can use such terms of a humancreature--be incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must beright, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good;instinctively, infallibly wise--wise, not for self-development, butfor self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above herhusband, but that she may never fail from his side: wise, not withthe narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with thepassionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitelyapplicable, modesty of service--the true changefulness of woman. Inthat great sense--"La donna e mobile," not "Qual pium' al vento";no, nor yet "Variable as the shade, by the light quivering aspenmade"; but variable as the LIGHT, manifold in fair and serenedivision, that it may take the colour of all that it falls upon, andexalt it.

(II.) I have been trying, thus far, to show you what should be theplace, and what the power of woman. Now, secondly, we ask, Whatkind of education is to fit her for these?

And if you indeed think this a true conception of her office anddignity, it will not be difficult to trace the course of educationwhich would fit her for the one, and raise her to the other.

The first of our duties to her--no thoughtful persons now doubtthis,--is to secure for her such physical training and exercise asmay confirm her health, and perfect her beauty; the highestrefinement of that beauty being unattainable without splendour ofactivity and of delicate strength. To perfect her beauty, I say,and increase its power; it cannot be too powerful, nor shed itssacred light too far: only remember that all physical freedom isvain to produce beauty without a corresponding freedom of heart.There are two passages of that poet who is distinguished, it seemsto me, from all others--not by power, but by exquisite RIGHTNESS--which point you to the source, and describe to you, in a fewsyllables, the completion of womanly beauty. I will read theintroductory stanzas, but the last is the one I wish you speciallyto notice:-

"Three years she grew in sun and shower,Then Nature said, 'A lovelier flowerOn earth was never sown;This child I to myself will take;She shall be mine, and I will makeA lady of my own.'

'Myself will to my darling beBoth law and impulse; and with meThe girl, in rock and plain,In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,Shall feel an overseeing powerTo kindle, or restrain.'